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New research from the New England Journal of Medicine shows that when immunotherapy is paired with chemotherapy in lung cancer patients, their survival time almost doubles when compared to if they only underwent chemotherapy.

Immunotherapy uses parts of a patient’s immune system to fight the cancer present in them. The treatment may simply boost the immune system or teach the immune system to attack specific cancer cells. When used after chemotherapy, it is common that the survival rate of the patient increases.

In the study, 400 patients received the two treatments combined and a smaller group only received chemotherapy. Lead investigator of the study, Dr. Leena Gandhi, told CNN that patients treated with the immunotherapy and chemotherapy were “superior in terms of response–keeping people alive without progression of their cancer–and improving the overall survival of patients with metastatic lung cancer compared to chemotherapy alone, and the differences were not small.”

This only applies to patients who have non-small cell lung cancer which means the cancer does not begin in surface long cell layers and the patient does not have certain genetic mutations. Non-small cell lung cancer is much more common than small cell lung cancer as it affects almost 85% of all lung cancer patients, according to CNN. Lung cancer is the leading cause of death in cancer patients and is the second most common type of cancer, causing 1.96 million deaths every year worldwide. The American Cancer Society reports that “Each year, more patients die of lung cancer than of colon, breast, and prostate cancers combined.”

Where many people with lung cancer may originally only have a few months left to live, they may now be able to have years left because of this recent study.